2015-08-20:

Fri:
Wrote 2000 words of chapter 169 in the morning.

Then the afternoon began. Oh, you silly afternoon.

Put the right mail settings back into Carlos' email program, getting him off imap, which I still can't believe the auto process finds.

It's really what comes now that really blisters my barnacles. Bashes my bologna? Buckles my ballista? Bamboozles my barista? Whatever, it does something.

First off was the seized fan in the old PC. Made the graphics card overheat and killed the whole system. That I figured out relatively quickly.

But come to upgrading 8.1 to 10. Wow. First of all, it seems I couldn't use the tool to put the ISO I had downloaded earlier onto the flash drive. It wanted to download it again. So I found another tool to do it. Turns out when it finished and I tried to run it, it just gave me an error message. Super.

So I had to download the thing over their crappy 8mbit/sec DSL connection.
That finally made the flash drive. So I began the install.

"Something happened"

Really? That's where we are with state of the art error messages now, MS? The electronic equivalent to a pouty three year old?

"How did this lamp break?"
"I don't know. Something happened?"

By that time I had been there since 3:00 and it was now 6:00. And the install had yet to begin. Good thing I anticipated this extreme lack of progress (it's MS after all) and brought a book.

I tried booting it from the USB drive but it wants a product key, which of course I don't have because you have to do the upgrade from a running system for some bizarre reason. Remember, oh, fifteen years ago, booting PCs from CD to do an upgrade? It would either a) ask you to put the CD in or b) look at the HD and determine what version of windows you were running. This was win98 folks. Between error messages that tell me absolutely NOTHING but "something happened, derp" and not being able to perform clean upgrades… MS is spiraling downhill quick. I mean Win8 was bad enough, where you had to use 3rd party tools just to get the product key out because they don't afix the stickers anymore. But now not even handing them out during the "upgrade for free" period? Why? I hate you, MS.

They should just license a picture of derpy hooves and throw that up on the screen. It would be exactly as effective, and cuter to look at. I mean obviously it tried to do SOMETHING. Just then. Obviously there is a routine that makes the message pop up on the screen. Why can't it say "I tried to do X but instead Y happened." You know, something useful? Oh right, forgot who I was talking about there.

So he didn't want to stay much longer so I have to go back tomorrow and try this process again. Meanwhile, I get to compile a list of things that can make the process fail so I can go back and try them, tediously, one at a time, tomorrow.

SO FUN.

So that took an hour. Wonder if it'll help. SPOILER: IT WON'T.

Sat:
Went over to try and install 10 for the second time. Didn't work. Tried the two pages worth of notes I made. Nope. So I figured I would do a "refresh" because that's not supposed to change your stuff, right? Nope, it told me that failed too. Then there was some "volume locked" error but when I ran the commands to see if it was locked for myself it wasn't. Oh, and there's two windows updates that seem to succeed but keep being shown again and again, so they really aren't being applied.

Yeah, that machine messed up.

Got back at 2:00, the guy insisted on paying me by the way, despite my not being able to actually do what he wanted. I told him at this point the last option was reloading the machine from scratch, a pain in the butt if ever there was one.

Ate lunch.

Sean isn't feeling well, but Gemma is fine. They don't know what happened.

Finished chapter 169.

Watched a bit of Dune, part 1 of three.

Sun:
I got a bunch of calls today, which led to actual work. I have four places to go tomorrow! How did that happen?

Not much else exciting, watched the other parts of Dune, and the 1980s Dune movie. Did some cleaning up as well.

Plague was back, so I watched his latest video.

And then started chapter 170.

Mon:
Did the shopping. Two different points today. First, the pet store did not have large bags of the special food so I had to purchase a smaller one. They had some that was far more expensive though, can't imagine why that was the case.

Then there was the tremendous line outside Buffalo Wild Wings… at 9:30 in the morning. Huh?

Only later was this mystery solved for me. In the mail I received a "free wings for one year" promotion for the first 100 customers. It's just a "snack size" order repeated 52 times. But I guess people were willing to wait for hours for it.

Left at 12:15 to begin the long, long, afternoon.

Which went pretty well. Only the last one really annoyed me, but let us take them in order.

First was just putting the power supply in, so obviously that went fine. They now owe me a hundred and fifty dollars. I'd love to see it before the year is out, if that's okay with you guys?

Then over to a tuneup, or what I was led to believe was one. Apparently they refreshed a win8 machine a few days ago for some bizarre reason? And didn't mention that on the phone? But they used to have 3 machines, but he gave one to his son, so that balanced it out. Seems the wrong away to go about things, I've given my parents basically all their computers, as ones I've discarded. And by discarded I mean, uh, moved on from. Yeah. They're not trash.

Love you!

Then over to a quick one. It was the lady with the deaf son, so I never get the full story before I go there. He has a Mac. She has a PC. I thought she was having trouble with HER machine. No. It was an internet issue, and for some reason the reading list (who even uses that? I didn't know it existed) wasn't syncing between has various devices. I messed with it and got it working.

Then to the last and longest. 2/3 machines over there were absolutely taken over by crap. I mean just swarming with stuff. Got them taken care of and got home at 7:30.

Ate dinner, made my calls. None new for tomorrow, just the 9:30 one. But some for Wednesday when I have to take The Squeak in for his X-rays.

Talked to Ellen for about a half hour. Apparently the kodak software uses the absolute path rather than the relative one, so it was putting stuff in a new "my pictures" folder that didn't exist. Marvelous. So it made one itself. Rather then just asking the system where the "My pictures" folder was, like every other windows program I've ever seen.

I'm pretty sure they gave up making printers, do they still make cameras? What does Kodak even do nowadays?

Huh, not much I guess? They do have a camera line, dominated by this guy who is apparently trying to take a picture while getting smacked in the Jimmies? Maybe it's better for the whole "artistic vision" to have a really bad pain you have to work through? Frees the mind, sort of a zen type of thing?

[[image file="2015-08/jimmy.jpg" alt="are you in pain sir?" ]]

Wouldn't it be an enormous irony if that shot was taken with, like, a canon or something?

Anyway.

They all seem to be 16MP. Weird. Across the whole line.

Finished chapter 170.

Tues:
Did my one appointment. Went fine, set up his new router though I'm not sure he actually needed a new router. Then put his security camera on the network and found out no-ip is free. They nag you every 30 days though. I guess that's fair. Looked at his laptop, yeah it's 8 years old and running Vista, it's gonna be slow.

Back here I ate lunch and called the three people back, two of which called today. Reached none of them. Sigh. Now what?

Wrote chapter 171. It was pretty slow going, it was a fight and I was sort of coming up with things Ursula could do magically that still made sense for her to do, that sort of thing. Anyway, got it done.

Got a few more calls as well, so as well as taking a kitty in at 8:00 for his X-rays I have a few places to go. Like 4. Two are certain to be fairly short, one is just taking a HD apart and taking her old machine away, and the other has some kooky document opening issue.

Looks like business is picking up? I've said that before though, so I'll believe it when I see it.

Five. Five places to go. The last lady having minecraft trouble got back to me. So I said 6:00, I should have Squeak back by then.

So basically Squeak, then 10:00, then lunch, then three bang next to each other in time, then back to get Squeaker, then out again.

Why does everything have to happen at once? Where were you people those weeks I had nothing to do? Why did your problems happen NOW and not THEN, more spaced out?

I don't understand how the world works!!!!!!!

I'm playing some Dark Souls.

Wed:
Got the kitty to the vet on time, then waited for 9:30 to roll around so I could leave.

Got the first one done pretty quick. His fan was not spinning at all, I poked it with a paperclip (it's a laptop) and it started, but it's making a weird noise. Replacement time! Also several keys were missing on his keyboard and he got hit by a crypto locker virus in January, so all his documents were toast. I cleaned it up where I could.

Came back here, ate lunch. Got the screen for the laptop so I changed that and started the mbam scan. Left for my busy afternoon.

The first problem I think was that office got messed up and was no longer opening properly. I deleted it and installed LibreOffice in place of OpenOffice as it could read her old works spreadsheets.

Then just taking the HD out of a machine. She gave me the whole thing for recycling, which included the monitor, which I like to use in a little thing called reuse.

Then the awful one. Win10. Takes minutes and minutes to even boot, and basically does nothing after that. Tried booting in safe mode, I guess MS still didn't fix the F8 key not working. Had to boot it again, wait to actually get into MSCONFIG and reboot it from there. Same issue. Ran a HD scan, it said it was fine though of course I didn't do the surface scan.

I offered to take it back with me and look into it more but she wants me to come back tomorrow and transfer the files to her brother's laptop. She's thinking about getting a laptop herself. (get an Apple, hint hint.)

Got Squeaker, he's doing fine. Tooth was worse than they expected, not better, so much for waiting. It was only 30% of what I made the entirety of last month. This has been the most expensive pet…

Looked into possible fixes for the win10 issue while eating dinner. Could be graphics drivers, or perhaps I need to spin around on one foot while chanting "wooba wooba." You know, the usual for MS.

Left for my 6:00.

She had a minecraft problem. One machine I learned had an intel graphics card with a driver bug so versions past 1.7.2 didn't work anymore, just crashed.
The other machine I just upgraded the video drivers and the performance perked up considerably.

Back here I finished up the laptop, made a bunch of calls, and that was that. Good amount of work for tomorrow, 3 places to go. Then some further out as well. Of course, one of the three is going back to the crappy win10 machine. Still have no idea how I'm going to deal with it. It just takes too long to get it to do anything. Maybe after I transfer her files she'll let me take it?

Thurs:
She wants a new laptop, but everything seems to be out of stock at the moment? Anyway, when I got there the screen had a message about replacing the hard drive. Odd, as it copied her stuff off just fine. Weird. Maybe there's some other problem with it? Guess we'll see what she comes up with.

Anyway, should start at the "very good place to start." Went to see the accountant guy. Who called right before I left, making total calls THREE. Really people, one call is all it takes. I'll get there just as soon as I possibly can. And you know it.

Anyway, their battery backup was complaining, and they lived with it all day. Suckers. I couldn't live with it two minutes. In getting the SAN device up and running I saw the right HD of the RAID had a "warning" and the backup drive wasn't being recognized. So they need a bunch of stuff.

Ordered it.

Then at 11:00 setting up the internet for some folks that moved. Apparently despite being told the internet was going into the basement the person setting up the direcTV took the cable over, so the TV worked, but the cable modem didn't. Took some doing to find the right wire, they had wires everywhere in that room. One which I gave a yank on and found I was being trolled, it had been cut and just stuck up there to look like it went someplace. You got me, fair enough.

So I figure that out. Then Win10 buddy, and back here.

Where it rained really hard for some time, then tapered off. I worked on chapter 172, Susan made it to Hades so I guess I better think up what he actually wants her to do.

I had a detailed plan for the mermaids and a little for the last place she has to go, but not for these next two.

Got some calls today, that's good.

Didn't reach one person, but I have two for tomorrow. One is replacing the fan at 3:00. Hope I get it tomorrow, website says it's in Rochester and expected delivery was today. Weird.

Coming into Saturday I have one job, no word from Sean but he's probably still recovering. Then Sunday the usual.

Someone asked about my ancient and terrible cocoabornes project, so I spent a couple of hours getting it to compile on modern machines. Mind you, that's still not playable, but someone wanted some advice to so I gave them some. (It should have been, cram it, but hey, it was an interesting exercise.)

No dark souls tonight, I guess. Oh well, only have the rest of my life.

Bedtime soon. Hope you all have a good weekend and stuff. August is going fast, I heard geese flying overhead and honking. Enjoy it while you can.

Bye!